Like Roger Dangerfield, American vice presidents get no respect. Witness the way Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker put down fellow Republican presidential candidate Sen. Mario Rubio of Florida, by floating talk of a Walker-Rubio ticket in 2016 — with Rubio on the back end.

It was an unsubtle denigration of Rubio’s qualification for the top job that Walker himself lusts after. The caper reflects the common view that the vice presidency is little more than booby prize awarded to achieve balance on the national ticket, and is a dead end to further political ambition.

Still reeling from the Republican defeat in the 2012 presidential election, House Speaker John Boehner warned in a Ripon Society speech the other day that the re-elected Obama administration is now out to kill off their party.

The embattled speaker declared that the administration would focus “everything in the next 22 months,” until the next midterm congressional elections, on attempting “to annihilate the Republican Party ... to shove us into the dustbin of history.”

The inauguration of a re-elected president should signify the country’s satisfaction with his first term, and anticipation of more of the same leadership that has brought about that second term. Barack Obama embarks on his presidential reprise in the hope among his supporters of a tougher and more confrontational leadership over the next four years.

There was a time when a president and the opposition party in Congress could agree on certain basics, such as the right of the chief executive to select members of his cabinet with no fuss or bother.

The president’s most important choice in this regard was of his secretary of state, the first among supposed equals in the cabinet and once at the top of the ladder in terms of presidential succession after the vice president.

After more than a year of fighting over the pace of economic recovery, the race for the White House comes down Monday night to President Obama’s supposedly strong suit, the conduct of foreign policy. But has the deadly terrorist attack on the American embassy in Benghazi leveled the playing field for his final face-to-face showdown with Mitt Romney?

Only days before the first critical presidential debate of 2012, why is the campaign of Mitt Romney suddenly showing signs of imploding?

There has been no marked improvement in the dim economic picture, to which he has pinned his hopes of ousting President Obama. Indeed, the slow national growth rate has reportedly slipped slightly again. Yet opinion polls in state after state indicate leakage in support for Romney, notably in swing states like Ohio and Florida.

Its candidate having blundered into unfamiliar foreign-policy territory by accusing President Obama of apologizing in the current Mideast crisis, the Romney campaign has now bizarrely compounded the political misstep by throwing more fuel on the fire.

Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan shattered expectations at his party’s convention in Tampa when he set aside his reputation as a dense policy wonk and wowed the hall with a full-blown attack on President Obama. The late, storied hatchet man Richard Nixon would have been proud.

Ryan offered himself as a new generation warrior breathing life into a GOP campaign heretofore slogging behind an uncertain trumpet of Mitt Romney. He fired up the crowd with a speech characterizing Obama as a used-up has-been and promising tough-love leadership from the Romney-Ryan team.

As the 2012 Republican National Convention gathers in Tampa, I find my thoughts going back nearly half a century to San Francisco in 1964. It was the first political convention I covered as a reporter, and it was the one at which Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona was nominated for president.

Groucho Marx was said to have declared that he wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. One wonders whether Mitt Romney may feel deep down the same way about his Republican Party. He has labored all year to convince the party faithful, especially the most conservative among them, that he is really one of them, yet many doubters remain.

In the expanding political universe of anonymous allegations and nonresponsive responses, the latest exchange between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and prospective Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney takes the cake.

At issue is Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of past income tax returns. Democrats have chided him by noting that his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, made 12 years of his returns public in his failed bid for the 1968 Republican nomination.